


Two Estates Blend

by 3amepiphany



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 23:28:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15806718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3amepiphany/pseuds/3amepiphany
Summary: Single estate teas are delightful, but even two of the same cultivars from different gardens can create an interesting brew when combined.





	Two Estates Blend

**Author's Note:**

> Dogoda and her raven/spellbook companion Lesk, are veterans of many ttrpg adventures over the past few years. I adore them and enjoy having characters I can easily adapt for both gaming and writing, though it's been interesting to watch them grow from a pair of homebrew kids to the 5e badasses that they are today. Big thanks to Mercer and the Nein (especially Taliesin wow) for letting me play in their world here, even if I can't play at their table.

She carefully unwrapped the small cloth and he watched as from it she produced a small nugget of pressed tea. She took her dagger and carefully halved it, and placed part of it into the pot of water quickly, taking care to keep her sleeve and the cloth away from the flames of the fire. The rest of it she re-wrapped and tucked back into the pouch she’d pulled it from.

“That’s… not all you have left, is it?” he asked her, a little worried suddenly that her good-will was being stretched a bit too far. “I must insist again, I have plenty of tea to share.”

“Ah, this is… it’s the same as any other tea I’ve had and will have - delicious, made to be drunk and even better when shared. It’s no worry. I’ve been without for longer than a few days’ time. It’s not something I can really just manifest on its own. Water, surely. Blocks of pu’erh are a different matter.” Dogoda dusted off her tunic idly as she surveyed the woods around them, and stepped over to inspect the flowering plant at the foot of one of the trees.

Caduceus could smell the tea as it brewed, and it certainly did smell delicious. “I’m very grateful, thank you,” he said after some time. “For today. It was very nice to have the help.”

“It was, wasn’t it? I really ought to be thanking you. Sometimes it’s better to travel in numbers. I honestly didn’t think those bandits meant to take the both of us on.” She really didn’t think they meant to take her on alone either but she supposed she looked like easy bait; encumbered with gear and supplies, and of an unfavorably dangerous race anyhow - worth getting rid of and bragging about later.

But when the firbolg seemed to appear almost instantaneously from the woods on the other side of the road, the three bandits seemed to be okay with the greater challenge.

“I hope they think twice before taking on another person around my size, regardless of if they meet with a second. Can I ask what brings you to this part of the map? I have to say that it’s a bit startling to meet a wolf-folk, as I’ve only ever heard stories of such, but I’m a curious sort of being and I imagine if your first reaction is to assist and share your provisions, I, uh. I may have been lied to in the past.” He had settled back against the tree he’d sat under, and reached for his pack to see if he might have anything to put up to offer for their evening meal before deciding it wouldn’t hurt to expend a spell and manifest a meal for each of them and one to share in the morning. She had started to pick at the flowers, seemingly satisfied that they weren’t anything dangerous, but at his last sentence she turned to look at him for a moment, the light of the fire catching the little metal beads and baubles hanging from the fur behind her ear.

“I’m clergy,” she said with a little wave of the flowers and a swish of her tail. The stems on the flowers were left long and they flopped about a little.

“Oh, delightful. As am I.”

“Not from Shady Run?”

“Thereabouts.”

“From the Grove, then.”

“Yes, actually. What do you know of the area?”

“Stories. Though I also suspect I’ve been lied to in the past.” Dogoda straightened and padded over, depositing the large bundle of flowers she’d collected down next to him. He handed her a stonefruit in exchange, and she bit into it and held it in her mouth as she reached for her crook, deftly using it to pull the pot off the fire. As they waited for it to cool a bit and finish brewing, she told him that she was actually hoping to visit the Blooming Grove, but the few people she had met along her way towards the Run had explained to her that she ought to skip the town entirely and simply travel straight through the Savalierwood to get to her destination. However, they also told her that she wouldn’t find much at the Bone Orchard anyways - it would be a loss of a trip and not worth the danger risked. “But I need provisions. Even if I’m to turn back south and return to Nogvurot. In case something like this happens again. I can only prepare so many spells a day.” He nodded at this understandingly and she continued. “I’ve wanted to visit the Grove for a while and I had no inkling that this area had fallen into such hard times. It’s disparaging.”

“I’m afraid it has, and it is. But it’s life. For us at least. And death.”

“Death doesn’t just come for living creatures. She comes for their bones and the fabrics and the jewelry they are buried with. She comes for the stones they are laid under and the iron fencing them in. She comes for the temples built for those to honor with their memories of them. She comes for those memories. She comes for beliefs and faith and eventually, the gods watching over those dying temples, themselves.”

There was silence as she finished, and then Caduceus reached for his bag again producing, almost comically, several large spring onions, tomatoes, a couple of round gourds and his little pouch of spices. She poured them their tea as he put his pot of manifested water onto their small campfire, nestling it right atop some of the flames so it would get to boiling, and placing the tomatoes in whole. He tucked the gourds in amongst the lower embers after piercing their tops a few times with his own dagger. He was about to sit down with Dogoda as her raven returned to them through their cast mist and fog, his great white wings making a soft sound as he looked about for a perch and settled on a fallen branch near his companion. “Hello,” Caduceus said, “glad to see you again.”

“He-lo,” Lesk said.

“Have you eaten, my love?” Dogoda asked him.

“Eat. Mice.”

“Good, as we are nearly out of ink as well. That’s not considered a food so it’s amongst the things I must purchase. But in a pinch he soaks it up like… well. Like a book.”

“He’s a very pretty book, I’ve got to say. Loud, too.”

“Isn’t he?” She gave the feathers of the raven’s chest a ruffle, and he cawed - it sounded a little like laughter - but after a bit of this he started to play-snip at her fingers with his beak, and then took off, settling instead on the crook of her staff, leaned against the tree closest to the tent with a soft caw. She apologized and let him be.

After some time Caduceus got up to smash the tomatoes that had been stewing, add the onions and a good number of his spices into the pot, and then empty a good quantity of dried lentils out of his bag and into it as well, tipping the bag gently but then catching another piece of stonefruit as it tumbled out too. This, they split, and once finished he took the three pits they had between them and started to clean them off very carefully.

Dogoda carefully wove the flowers into a crown, and set it atop his head. She added the discarded bits of stems and leaves into the pot with the tea and placed it back on the fire, next to the gourds, which were roasting up nicely. Lesk preened himself quietly and settled in to sleep as the sky they could see through the fog and trees darkened as well.

The firbolg, tucking some of his brilliant hair around the crown to anchor it down, said, “Can we go back to what you were saying, uhm, about Her, about Death? Are you of Her service, then?”

“Newly, yes. Before Her I walked the Path of Tranquility - they are very nearly the same in practice, I have found. And you? Of Melora?”

“I am.”

“Mm. The Raven Queen is very fond of Her. I think you and I should get along very well. What takes you along these roads?”

“Testing my boundaries,” he said. “And testing the boundaries of the blight upon my home. I worry that if I stay, I may rot with the rest of it, overcome. I’ve been there nine summers alone, now. Family has all left with the purpose of finding out what was happening to our lovely home. I can’t lie, uh, I’d like to as well, maybe even find out if it’s something that should be stopped but I also I worry that if I leave, the rot of the rest of the world will find me first.”

“Well,” she said, with a little guilt in her voice, knowing now why he wanted to come back to the discussion, “decay, decomposition… is natural.”

“Oh, wholly. It’s just. The blight itself, it doesn’t feel natural, you know? It never has.”

“...Do you believe that’s what drew your family out and away?”

“I do.”

“It seems to me like your dilemma is deciding on where to rest.”

“It is. To break it down very simply, it is. What brings the Raven Queen to the Grove for a visit? Just checking in? Coming for the bone and the stone, and the beliefs?”

“Sort of.”

He nodded, his great round eyes with their flat pupils staring at her, almost knowingly. “I’d say counting down the seasons for Her but I think Melora’s got Her on that one.”

“Seeing how many were taken, really, is more like it,” she told him with a toothy grin. “I like... I like happy towns. I like growth. I like big families and expansion and peace and cooperation. Because it means more for Her, in the end. But things like this, this slow creep of undue decay and evil, it’s… it hastens the process and is not fulfilling of the relationship between Her and Melora. It cuts Her short of what She could have and it’s unfair. I wouldn’t be surprised to see war come to the Empire and the outlying lands sooner than it should. I dislike that, as much as it does lend to Her. She dislikes it as well.”

“It seems to me that your dilemma is deciding when to rest,” he said, and they laughed. “Decay, decomposition. It’s natural. I have to say I’m a little guilty of pushing those along, not necessarily death itself but everything after it, mostly the new life from it, but, war is most definitely a blight - on Her time or not. If it’s not, what do you suppose can be done?”

Dogoda sighed, her ears swiveling about some. “I don’t know.”

As they enjoyed the rest of their meal (with a bit of bread pulled from the bag as well), she questioned what he meant by pushing such things along.

“Not because I’m worried at all, I’m not going to go running to Her and say ‘he’s tangling your lines’ like a child would run to their mother in a fight,” she said, sort of half-lapping, half-sipping at the soup from her wooden bowl.

Caduceus ruminated on that and some of the roasted gourd, and finally said that it would best be shown in the morning, on their way out of the area and back towards the Grove.

And he held to that - after their breakfast of the rest of the soup and bread, the stonefruit pits he’d cleaned off the night before went several inches into the ground with help from his own gnarled staff, along with some of the ashes and charcoal left from their fire. With a spell from his hands, Dogoda watched the ground shift a bit around one of the buried pits, and heard a few muffled pops and cracks. It took maybe a minute or two before soft green sprouts wrestled their way up out of the soil. “Those will be trees by the time you pass back through these woods to Nogvurot. They may even have fruit. That depends on how long you stay at our temple.”

“Well, that depends on how much tea you can spare one like me.”

“I’ve plenty of tea, actually. That would also make for another good example.”

“I’d be delighted to learn more,” she said, shouldering her pack, causing Lesk to hop off haphazardly and settle for Caduceus’ kindly outstretched arm.


End file.
